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User blog:1 (New York City Subway service)/Michaelmas
Winter came to Michael's city. It was chilly, biting, and drizzly, like all Northwestern winters. Some things just don't change. Michael had heard the old people remark that the winter in Pacifica was just like Portland way back in olden days. Michael paid Pacifica, the city where he was a foreign native, no notice, and Sunk down every day after school to his true home of Shanghai. Shanghai was wet cold as well. The distant sun was no match for Shanghai's legendarily overcast winter skies. The mercury hovered miserably just above freezing, as the subways and buses filled up with men in thick coats and gloves and children filled up with hope of snow. But what Michael wanted to see the most was the early nights of the city. As night drew a curtain of dark over the buildings and elevated highways, the apartment blocks and skyscrapers would make for themselves an artificial day. The burning streetlights reminded many of how unforgiving this city was, but welcomed and comforted Michael. This week's SVES meetup was in a haven of green tucked in the warrens of one of the city's most convoluted interchanges. Five expressways met here, in one grand mix-up perpetually choked by the car horns and curses of commuters. And the directions which had been broadcast over IRC the day earlier required him to cross a twelve-lane freeway. Michael smirked to himself. He knew this was merely a trick used to test his coding skills. Just who did the noobs in irc.virt.net think they were? They were pretty good, but their claims to being experts and masters betrayed more arrogance than wisdom. Michael opened up the developer window. By redefining his position he was soon in the meeting place. His good friend, Bryson, stood there, agape at how easy he had circumvented the many elaborate traps he had cleverly laid. But he was gladder that Michael was there. "No school?" Bryson managed to stammer. "Nope. Let out on the 20th. You?" Michael found a seat on the wet grass. "21st." Bryson also had a seat next to Michael. Four or five members of SVES managed to make it to the meeting on time, mostly those whose residences, and thus the places they were programmed to appear in every time they Sunk, lay nearby. Bryson was seemingly unimpressed by the low turnout. Nevertheless, he continued with his plans for the day, and started on a grandiose speech that ended with "Let us, therefore, go off-world, beyond the grasping hands of the VNS. Let us, therefore, leave this accursed city which is teeming with VNS moles. And most importantly, let us, therefore, have fun ditching these VNS agents!" Bryson was transfixing when he spoke. So transfixing, that nobody had even bothered to greet the five or six people who trickled into the meeting place while Bryson was speaking. There was no applause, but plenty of nodding. "Then away to the spaceport straightway!" Bryson announced, and everyone else followed silently. The spaceport was located where the South Station was in real life. Its architecture was still compelling and futuristic. The spaceport was still cylinder-shaped. A great eave of glass shielded those on the elevated walkway that surrounded the second-story waiting room from the elements, while the ground level was an intricate tangle of walkways and elevators ensconced in a painstakingly landscaped field outside. Beyond the field was a plaza dotted with underground entrances which the majority of the passengers utilized because of the cold. The small group went into one, passing through a narrow, grimy walkway till at last it opened up to the station hall, a maze of walkways leading up to the waiting room. Michael pressed his EarCuff, and he virtually ordered tickets for a trip to Ares Station on Mars. From Ares it was possible that they could go on even further to the frontier outposts, where there were little more amenities than rudimentary pressure vessels. Michael discovered that while there were no direct flights to Ares, they could transfer at Selene on the Moon and then go on to Mars. The coordinate system the developer window used only covered locations on Earth's surface and 20 km above it, which was what had given Michael and his friends the idea to try it, but which was also why they couldn't reposition themselves. "I pity the poor schmuck who forgot to set a boundary for the VirtNet," Bryson smirked. "I bet he's getting one hell of a lashing right now," Michael joked. Category:Blog posts